It is well known to formulate hard-surface cleaning compositions, containing organic solvents and chelating agents.
European Patent Applications 0 048 882, 0 080 749, 0 126 545 describe the use of solvents represented by mixtures of terpenes with benzyl alcohol or butyl carbitol, together with builders which are mainly polyphosphates, or nitrogen containing strong sequestrants like NTA.
EP 0 105 863 and U.S. Pat. No. 3,591,510 describe the use of certain glycol ether derivatives as solvents in liquid cleansers, together with polyphosphate builders.
The above solvent/builder combinations have proven very effective; however, in recent years phosphates have come under scrutiny for environmental reasons, and other non-phosphate strong sequestering agents are also facing acceptability problems related to toxicity/environmental safety.
There is therefore a need for hard-surface-cleaning compositions which are effective and at the same time are not likely to raise safety concerns with regard to toxicology and environment.
The present invention is based on the discovery that certain known chelating agents, when combined with a specific class of organic solvents, provide very good results in terms of soil-removal from hard surfaces, because of unexpected and beneficial chelant/solvent interaction, said known chelating agents being safe compounds constituted solely of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.
Carboxymethyltartronic acid has been described as detergency builder in U.S. Pat. No. 3,865,755, and in DE-OS-2 549 741.
Oxydisuccinic acid and carboxymethyloxysuccinic acid are known in the same functionality, from U.S. Pat. No. 3,635,830, and 3,692,685.
Tetrahydrofuran tetracarboxylic acid is known as phosphate replacement builder from U.S. Pat. No. 3,580,852.
Diglycolic acid is known as sequestering agent in detergent compositions, from DE-OS 2 150 325.
All above materials have not found great success as phosphate builder replacement in laundry detergent compositions, since their sequestering power has been considered as too weak.
None of the above detergent compositons encompass hard-surface cleaning compositions, and there has been no disclosure of the chelating agents described herein, in combination with organic solvents according to the present invention.
It has now been surprisingly discovered that the combination of the chelating agents herein with certain organic solvent provide very good results in terms of soil removal from hard surfaces.
It is therefore the object of the present invention to provide efficient hard surface cleaning compositions containing the combination of a safe chelating agent, and a suitable organic solvent.